Evaluating Three Wiki Applications

I was recently given the mission to create a Wiki for a Team and a Dream client using a third party application.

I therefore briefly evaluated three Wiki interfaces: http://www.jotspot.com/, http://www.pbwiki.com, and http://www.atlassian.com/confluence.

I opened a trial account on each, and spent roughly an hour or so creating and browsing my options for each of my Wikis.

I must say, from not even knowing what a Wiki was prior to my mission, the venture was quite interesting. I came to an easy and confident conclusion on which third party Wiki application to use. I also developed an identical confidence of how valuable a Wiki can be for the efficiency of most businesses. After I had chosen which Wiki option to ultimately use, I developed a comprehensive Wiki for our Team and a Dream client. Soon thereafter, a pleasant curveball was thrown at me from the Wiki option which was formerly last in my rankings of the three Wiki options. Please read on to learn of this pleasant surprise…

Here is what I found about each:

PBwiki

This was my favorite (only at first!) because:

- extremely easy to use and navigate
- have the option to have a company-wide password for all members to sign in with. Can also easily create separate individual logins/passwords within the company Wiki ‘site’ whilst adding pictures, detailed profiles, etc. for each user
- Very easy to upload files from your computer, and to add comments to them
- Easy to use permission/administration utility for all pages
- Easy to add style elements to any pages, posts, etc.
- Good customer service
- Relatively cheap at $25/month ($300/year) for our needs
- customizable CSS template page options
- Great all around!

Confluence

- too simple, hardly any utilities
- can’t seem to categories attached files or sort them to various pages
- poor design
- essentially just a listing of comments, pages, files, etc.
- good customer service - expensive - $1200/lifetime for 25 users

JotSpot

I disliked JotSpot the most initially because:

- can add a file, but ambiguous as to how to do it
- cannot seem to add comments to a file
- can’t even easily add a hyperlink to a post/comment
- cannot seem to include a hyperlink to a file within the same page
- can’t seem to comment directly to a post/page without tediously changing administrative settings for entire page and/or user
- Relatively cheap at $25/month ($300/year) – this is actually very good!
- decent customer service
- Overall, extremely difficult!

* After a week or so of using PBwiki (which was my initial favorite upon evaluating the original (3) options), I was invited to try out JotSpot’s newest Wiki version (an upgrade of the former). And…

I was most pleasantly surprised, as this newer version far-outmatched even PBWiki in the ease of use, price, and tools available within! This was a perfect example of how renovation produced innovation, of which technology was the main beneficiary. Team and a Dream has been using JotSpot’s new Wiki since, and have been very pleased with the ease of using productivity tools on their Wakes such as Knowledge Bases, Calendars, Spreadsheets, and the list goes on.
With every new technology comes its shortcomings, such as intermittent bugs, coding inconsistencies, and minor problems of the like. Although JotSpot has not flawlessly fixed these continual shortcomings, they have assertively communicated with us on the status of the respective situations.

Bottom Line – I would definitely recommend the PBWiki over Confluence without doubt, but consider JotSpot’s newest Wiki version as the greatest.